Quasar Sniffer

I can host it in like 30 minutes if anyone wants. I just got home from work. Post here if you need me to set up a room

Thanks very much. I tried a random Amazon Prime thing again this morning just to see if it would work and it was marginally functional. It took forever to even log in but it eventually worked. I would just hate to be like "yeah, I can host it!" and then have it crap out on me.

I will try again when I get back on Friday night. I can do one Saturday night as well, but my start time wouldn't be until about 10 or so for both evenings. Let me know what works best for you folks.

Ugh, so I'm trying to set up a Rabb.it showing for this but I keep getting a "sorry, our shit's not working" message AND I'll be going out of town for the next few days because of Funeral Bullshit, so I apologize to everyone for not being able to help out in that regard. Sorry

Cool! I've been meaning to watch it for a while now, and I just felt I would get more out of it if I did so in a communal setting with cool people who also love movies. Thanks for indulging me!

Ok, if I have the consent of everyone here, I would like to break form a bit and do our collective best to support the film work of one of our intrepid HDTGM hosts. And as the Road Picture is as time-honored a form as the musical in movies, I figured it would be appropriate to make my pick... If anyone has any objections, then I will definitely make a more appropriate pick. Much appreciated!

I still have "Wild Wild Life" stuck in my head and I am NOT sad about it.

re: Louis's character..., I am inclined to agree with what @Cam Bertand conclude that he is mostly very sad. He feels lost and in need of validation from the normal standards of adulthood put upon him (get a job, get married). But at the same time, he is profoundly touched by emotional connections, not only with people, but with music, which is why he is so profoundly affected by sad songs. I found that incredibly moving, because not only is he affected by music more than anyone else he meets besides his friend Ramon and other musicians, but that music is out of step with the women he attempts at courting. He loves country, but not "Hollywood country," the kind most popular with America, especially at the time. He feels old fashioned, not just in what he is looking for in a partner, but in his artistic passions. It is the society he is living in, obsessed with convenience and aesthetics, that prevents him from finding a woman with similar long-term relationship goals as he does. I mean, it's fucking ludicrous to think he can't find someone to date who isn't looking for mere casual connections in rural Texas, but the way the town is constructed, centering on corporate interests and fashion shows and the like, prevents him from seeing that. As emotional as he is, he is also blind to what is in front of him (as @Cameron H.so elegantly observed about his interaction with Byrne at the mall). None of these people are wrong in their goals of shopping or owning a home or having clean, neat relationships. The parking IS convenient, the mall IS bright and friendly, the air conditioning IS lovely in the Texas summer. It's just, as we see with Louis, many of us need something more.

TOTALLY, I kept thinking, "they have an album called 'More Songs about Buildings and Food.' David Byrne has some major auteur goals that he is achieving here!" I dunno, I just loved this movie! I am down for the mise-en-scène of David Byrne's brain!

Yeah, if anyone is familiar with the Tobolowsky Files or his appearances on other podcasts, he does get into stories about how he was able to "read" people's "tones" and have psychic phenomena occur around him or predict things. They are legitimately weird and interesting tales, whatever your opinion on such phenomena might be. Regardless, those stories are the origin for the tone-reading scenes and stories in True Stories.

This is another spoiler for what my thoughts on this movie are, but... although I traditionally identify as a heterosexual male (unless I'm watching a Thor movie or listening to Neil Gaiman speak), I think I need to expand whatever my sexual orientation is in some way to make sure it includes "David Byrne in a cowboy hat driving a car."

Encountered this vinyl soundtrack at my local independent theater earlier today. The sacred voodoo of David Byrne watches over Musical Mondays...

I am enormous fan of both Talking Heads and David Byrne, but I have somehow never seen True Stories. VERY MUCH looking forward to this!

I'm gonna spoil my reaction before Monday but, holy shit everybody, I am about halfway through Passing Strange and I am absolutely loving it! It's totally a theater piece and not cinematic at all, but the music is fantastic and the performances (from the very small cast) are all excellent. Many thanks to CakeCalbug for picking it! This even totally makes up for Across the Universe

I do love Canada's love of Beavers! In any case, I thought the two kids in the film's prologue were really cute, and far more charismatic than the actual leads they would grow up into. So this movie should have been ALL flashback to their childhoods, maybe adjusting the actual time the movie takes place back a few years/decades to make the lack of technology and presence of so many antiquated Italian tropes somewhat more applicable. The plot of the film could have been the kids PREVENTING the feud from even forming, making the dads realize how fucking stupid their feud is and how only together does their pizza become the Best in Canada. They could conspire during the Toronto Little Italy Pizza Festival to combine their respective shops' elements (sauce, crust, etc.), only to reveal their deeds afterwards. The movie could end with an epilogue about how "I [Nikki] would eventually go to Europe to learn to make food OTHER than pizza" "and I [Leo] would stay in Toronto to run the pizza shop, but I wouldn't stay in Toronto forever..." and then maybe one last shot in a cosmopolitan European city in which Leo is opening his own pizza shop and, on opening day, Nikki walks in, they lock eyes and smile. Roll credits. No decades of bitterness. No bullshit soccer in the rain. Just madcap kids making pizza and fighting their parents' petty bullshit to preserve adult friendship via the power of childhood optimism and goodness. And I realize the reason this movie ISN'T a period film might be budget as much as anything, but I am just spitballing ideas here.

This is the official banner of Toronto, adorned with its official motto, "Diversity Our Strength," which is one of the many reasons why I love both Canada and its most populous city: So this makes Little Italy's Italian buffoonery and lack of use of ACTUAL Toronto spaces even more egregiously stupid. Fuck this movie.

It would not be weird. As an Italian myself, I say CELEBRATE THAT HERITAGE, especially when cake is involved. As for dishes I love, I have always had a soft spot for tiramisu. My uncle is an astoundingly good chef, and he makes this stuffed calamari that is... And pizza. Obv. And I must second Paul's Picks for comic writer Kelly Thompson. She is FANTASTIC. From picking up the reigns on Jessica Jones, to Kate Bishop Hawkeye, to West Coast Avengers to Jem and the Holograms, she has done SO MANY great books.

What if we switch all this phone shenanigans around so Chris Evans is someone who's supposed to be getting an emergency phone call: a 911 operator! Kim Basinger can still manipulate the pulses of the smashed phone, but DOES call 911 and it's Chris Evans who answers. 911 operators are obviously people who are supposed to be responsible and punctual, etc., qualities that Evans has been accused of not having. So you automatically connect his personal and professional life. Maybe his unreliability has put him in hot water with his boss as well as his ex-girlfriend, so he is close to being fired. When he gets a call from Basigner, his immediate supervisor tells him it is a prank and to not waste time and resources following it up and to GET BACK TO WORK. But Evans takes note of the number and decides to call it himself on his CELLULAR phone when he shift ends (maybe he just pulled a 3rd shift so he is getting off work right around the time kids are being taken to school, thus adding an element of lack of sleep and therefore stress to his character). When he calls the 911 switchboard after discovering that the kidnapping is, in fact, real, we discover that his boss is ALSO in the pocket of the dirty cops, who recruited him/her to curtail any possible incoming 911 calls in case Basinger, her son, or her husband were reported missing (or if anyone saw them capture the husband in broad daylight). I realize this takes away some of the point of the movie, that it's a random stranger who gets a call and has to decide to help that person, but we still get a random 911 dispatcher getting the call and having to step-up, defy authority, and become a hero. Plus, it gives us an opportunity to either defy stereotypes of phone operators being women OR cast a woman in the lead role who immediately connects with another woman in peril, even if her male supervisors (and male police officers) are telling her to forget about it.

So if Mirror Ralph has any sort of interior life within the mirrors, I guess we can assume that Harry Potter is his favorite book series and Evil Dead II is his favorite movie?

I'll be ready with Rockula whenever. I'll be binging on Prestige Awards Show-type films pretty soon, so I feel like I need something to balance out my viewing to truly appreciate that oeuvre, and what better counter-programming than THIS movie?

That is an excellent trio of modern Westerns. Hell or High Water has stayed with me in a really profound way. One of my favorites of the last few years of any genre.

I'm pretty anti-list, I guess, as I feel art is so subjective that making a list of 100 best anything is a fool's errand. I'm here because I love great movies A LOT. That being said, I'd much rather THIS movie be on any Great list than Bonnie and Clyde or Easy Rider, two very important "new Hollywood" movies I just don't particularly care for. I mean, I love Army of Darkness, it's one of my favorite movies, but the only way THAT movie gets a mention in this conversation is when Amy threw some shade at it when interviewing Embeth Davidtz on the Schindler's List episode, as if it was some garbage bullshit Davidtz had to do before making a "real" movie. Anyway, greatness is subjective... but Schindler's List is really great by any metric, and so is Davidtz. Anyway, as for the "of its time vs. timeless" argument, I love art that IS of its time. Everything from German "New Objectivity" in the 1920s to Star Trek are examples of art or artistic movements that could have only originated in the very specific time and place they did, and from the artists who created them. Of course, some of that stuff still resonates and comes back in vogue, depending on the current political and social climate or whatever wave of nostalgia is in vogue. And I don't hold anything against timelessness in art either. I think something like Beauty and the Beast is timeless, while In the Heat of the Night is very 1960s, both in the way it depicts race relations and that it's a police procedural that clearly came before the flood of CSI and Law and Order shows, which I think changed the way audiences viewed all police procedurals. It's just kind of assumed now that the public knows about post-mortem examinations and how they work, while that might not have been the case in 1967. So methods of storytelling has changed, society has changed, filmmaking has changed, but we are still profoundly affected by these same issues and are still fascinated by this format of storytelling, so I think it's going to resonate. Art can tell us how far we've come, how far we still have to go, and maybe even how we've regressed. Also, I just really like this movie. And since this IS a Norman Jewison film, I feel it is entirely appropriate to say that Sidney Poitier is Ted Neeley Handsome!* *See the Musical Mondays group in the HDTGM forums for the origin of this reference

@sycasey 2.0, can you and I be Rocky Buds plz?

See, I fundamentally disagree with that as well. I think having Rocky fight the cancer and then give him a death scene, or even a death scene without fighting the cancer, would do just as much, if not more, to take away from Creed's story than Rocky living. It would have been too much, especially in the eyes of the media, for a story that should be Creed's, not the titular character of six other movies. His presence would have loomed too large if his death scene was there to loom over the rest of the film.

I know I'm late to the party on this one, but I just wanted to add in my two cents concerning this film and the franchise. My love for Rocky as a character and in the films themselves is nearly boundless, warts and all. There are flaws in all the entries in the series but I am able to enjoy them all to differing degrees (V being the big exception), and they all have my whole heart. That's part of why I waited so long to post here, as I did not want to be too vociferous in my response. I could go on, so I will focus specifically on something Amy said about Creed that I profoundly disagree with. When Rocky gets cancer in that film, I believe it would have been the weaker choice, for both the film and the character, if he would have forgone treatment, if he had given up, and died. It might have provided some narrative symmetry with Mickey dying, but Rocky giving up is anathema to the spirit of the character and the themes in this film and the original. Sure, Rocky almost always needs help to stay the course, but he always comes through in the end. It is the same with Adonis. They both need each other to make the more difficult, the stronger choice. They have to find the strength to not only fight for each other, but to discover (or rediscover) the self-worth to be able to fight for themselves. Rocky needed to learn how to value himself again, that his life mattered (so he could train Adonis, sure, but also so he can live). Just because he's no longer the titular character doesn't mean his story is now worthless. Adonis loves him, and sacrificing himself because his own fight would be a distraction would be a betrayal of that love, not supportive of it.